Specters In The Snow
by if.the.plane.goes.down
Summary: I'm not here looking for absolution, because I found myself an old solution.
1. Specters In The Snow

Specters In The Snow

**This is his body,  
>this is his love,<br>such selfish prayers  
>I can't get enough<strong>

The snow comes and the darkness rides along with it. A silent, predatory, partner. Alert and with its pale eyes open wide looking for a way to get in. The truth is that you will probably try to keep this darkness out. And you are entitled to this course of action. So bottle it up and put it on a shelf. Sweep it under the rug. Kick it into the back of the closet. But it will always get out. It will follow you. A shadow, another one of your faces. The nastiest, ugliest one. The one you pray nobody will ever see. The darkness follows Hatake Kakashi, grinning and huffing out pungent smoke from its acrid nostrils. Mostly, he tries to get away from it. But it becomes harder and harder to outrun yourself.

Previously, Kakashi's heart was pockmarked with hard blisters from rubbing up against things. Since then, he has become so good at building walls around his heart, he might have become an architect. If architecture had any means of supporting his bloodlust, his need for risk and bone breaking.

For 30 years he's been warning off Death with eye-stinging sake alone in his empty apart, and dog eared romance novels poised on the page in the book where the protagonist gets the girl and the girl gets to be beautiful. He has built himself a cage out of paper. But friends don't like to be kept at bay for too long. And the holidays roll around. And Death likes to visit him. And Death won't take no for an answer, then.

Kakashi passes spirited families on the street. Squawking children, toothless mouths open in protest of empty stockings. Their parents right behind them, holding hands, made of mistletoe. He's not fit to hold anyone's baby in his arms. Former students waves to him from their excited young clusters. They're thinking of bright lights and stolen kisses. Cups of cider. He waves back as if to say I'm ok. Of course it is convincing. Nobody knows that he sees Obito in every shop window. Screaming out at him with those child's eyes. _Whatcha gonna get me, baka? Don't be an old Grinch._ _Did you get me anything? Did you?_

His apartment isn't fit for company. He hasn't cleaned in a while. The lurking fangtoothed dust bunnies are an excuse for not inviting anybody over. What would they do if they saw Rin standing over his bed? _You never even told me you loved me._ Her white kiss on his ear. His face turning to frost. Eyelashes icicle-ing together. _Do you love me or don't you? You never even said if you did._

More sake. More sex. More nothingness. Snow falling like a pillow pressed over Konoha's rosy face outside the window. A stranger's body in bed beside him. Obito, Rin, those ghosts, if that's what they are, are the song he can never escape. Blaring through every speaker. Pouring out of every pore. The lyrics he knows by heart. _You never even said you loved me. Whatcha gonna get me, baka?_

Their voices frozen in childish registers. _Do you love me or don't you?_ Even after all these years. _Whatcha gonna get me? _One glass of sake. Two. _You never even said you…_ Touch me here. Please, don't stop. _Whatcha gonna get me?_ The snow still falling. The pillow over his head. _Do you love me or don't you? Whatcha gonna give me._ 12 glasses of sake. 25. _Why didn't you protect me? You have something that belongs to me, give it back._

Sakura roams the streets like a specter in the winter. Just the faintest shadow of the sunbeam she used to be. No longer hungry, no longer foolish. No longer anything that could cause bruises. On a snowy, breathy night she finds Kakashi stumbling down a darkly lit street. He's leaning against the wall on his elbow, groping along in the almost complete darkness. Heavy footed and swaying. Sakura doesn't call out to him because she doesn't want to scare him. Or shake him from whatever spell he has fallen over into if it means he won't notice that he's out in the snow a little longer. The smell of sake radiates off of him like a thousand pointing arrows. Help, over here. I'm right here. Doesn't anybody see me?

She had just waved goodbye to her friends. Talking of eggnog and open presents. It's Christmas eve. They had gone their separate ways and she hadn't expected to run into Kakashi. Kakashi plodding through the snow like a deer shot in the belly. Kakashi doubling over, coughing up sick all over the slushy cobblestone streets.

Sakura had never seen him as a human being. She had only ever seen him as a shinobi. She goes around to the side of him, touches his muscle-y back. Kakashi looks up and doesn't recognize her. At that moment, she decides that she will walk him home.

They take the stairs up to his apartment slowly. One then another then another like counting stars precisely in the sky. Kakashi leans on her for support coughing a wet, monstrous cough. Sakura's knees tremble under his weight. She gets him into bed and peels off his wet socks. His toes are stuck together. She puts on tea. The snow has not let up.

His eyes pierce right through her. A stab to the gut and twist. His left eye is red on the other side of the hitai-ate, a crimson bloom of blood blossoming like a deadly rose against the curve of his cheek. There's blood under the nails of his hands. Sakura is shivering from something other than the cold. She kisses him.

Sakura had not been planning to do this. You don't have to go through with this she tells herself. Her self answers with I do. On the stove the tea starts scorching. Screaming louder than her pulsing, desperate skin. Kakashi's red eye thick with lust, from the corner it's slowly bleeding, bleeding. Some people bleed where you can't see.

His soft tongue in her mouth tastes of rejection. She tries to swallow it down. There are enough stones in her belly to last for days, she realizes. She hopes she doesn't cough them up onto his imploring tongue. She latches on to it, with the hope not to sink. All winter she's been sinking.

His "I love you." steals the gravity from the room. All of a sudden they are floating. She can no longer feel her head attached to her body. Her limbs are pulling out of their sockets, wading across the room. She's so lightheaded she doesn't resist when he lifts her shirt over her head. Eyes eating her skin. Her goose pimpled arms, naked and white.

May'be tomorrow they wouldn't speak of it. May'be tomorrow, Kakashi wouldn't remember. May'be the glaze frosted his eyes like heated breath against a window was all the sake and nothing more or less. Sakura didn't want him to remember.

He held her in his arms crushed against his chest afterwards so close their hearts thumping against their chests sounded like the same knocking, frenzied visitor. And she couldn't tell who the tears in her hair belonged to.

Kakashi rolled away from her, mumbling into his pillow "I finally said it, Rin." He was going to go to sleep. Sakura's eyes were on the window. Konoha must have suffocated in the night under the heavy blanket of snow. Sakura was having trouble breathing. Sasuke would have to go.

He was sitting in the corner of the room. He had been there all night. Sakura wouldn't make eye contact with him. He was the way she remembered him purely, the blue Uchiha, shirt the tiny shorts. His fledgling little boy body, leaning forward on his knees, hands clasped beneath his chin. Those dark eyes watching them. Had been watching them all night. Trying to pick Sakura's limbs apart from Kakashi's. In the winter he always followed her. May'be now. May'be now he would leave her alone.

"Rin." Kakashi's eyes were closed, his speech still regrettably slurred. His face was quiet. He looked like a little boy. He would sleep well. Sakura would see to it. The room was warm with body heat. The sheets would stink of desperation for the next three washes. Everything was comfortable. "I said it, Rin." Sakura absently patted his knee. "Yes, Kakashi-kun. You did." Her eyes were on Sasuke. Sasuke was no longer grinning.


	2. Crystallize

Crystallize

**Regrets collect like old friends  
>here to relive your darkest moments<br>I can see no way, I can see no way  
>All of the ghouls come out to play<br>And every demon wants his pound of flesh**

Somewhere just outside the hinges of your imagination, there's a land made entirely of ice and snow. Sakura is there in an impenetrable frost cage whiter, harder, more forever than bone. The people of this ice kingdom have built a monument to shame and worthless sorrow. Sakura is the monument. She grabs the cage bars to shake her way out of it, but her fingers freeze and stick to the harsh whiteness. Her palms turn into snow. She tries to scream and beg out her freedom, but the words raindrop out of her mouth and freeze in midair. The ice kingdom people all stand around the cage and watch her. They have features she recognizes, each of their faces was her own at one point in time. Malice, Fear, Naivete. They are all there, have all come back to claim their piece of her. They lick their lips. They reach out and touch her frozen words, breaking them with the slightest tap. Sakura watches her words glinting in so many blindingly white shards on the white ground. Sometimes the ugliest things are the most beautiful. She manages to cry, and the tears crystallize on her cheeks.

Sakura comes up out of the dream like a baptized sinner being pulled from the depths of the water. The sharp, cold of the dream still washes over her. Disoriented, as if moving in slow motion, she blinks her eyes, struggling to adjust to the room brimming over with thin, yellow light. Sasuke stands at the headboard grinning down on her. His dark eyes scream possessive commands, though he doesn't speak. He never does. Sakura shoves him away. Her hand gets caught in his belly. An electric chill strikes her wrist, grows, crawling up her skin.

Last night? The snow? Kakashi?

The sheets? The Rin girl? Those words?

Was it all a dream? Just another one of the open doors in her chamber of fantasies? Or had it really happened? The room looks exactly as it should. No sign that a person other than Sakura had come in and ripped her clothing aside and knotted up her bedcovers in a frantic attempt to melt into her. The bedcovers. Lying on the floor in a tight coil like a sleeping serpent. But Sakura is a wild sleeper. She could have easily…he isn't here. He never had been. Had he? She looks at Sasuke. He is silent.

Sakura got up and went into the kitchen, Sasuke following close enough to nip her heels . She almost runs into Kakashi jumping into his pants, his face pointing like an arrow towards her front door.

"You." She says and immediately feels stupid.

You. As opposed to who? Another figment of her imagination? Had she expected to see this Rin girl after so much talk of her? Really, she was only trying to adjust. Trying to figure out what to do in a situation like this. What to do when you became the kind of person involved in a situation like this.

Kakashi's weary smile stretches out across his face like a tired cat. Rubbing his hands through his hair he looks older than he did through last night's film of want and sweat soaked desperation. The hollows under his eyes are bomb shelters. She hadn't quite noticed the hollows were so deep with the lights out.

"Ok, you caught me. It is I, Kakashi Hatake. Now that you've discovered me, I guess you're going to kill me?"

He is teasing her. Pulling his mask on over his face and already inching towards the door. Giving her that stupid crescent eyed smile, belittling her. He thought she was a child. Or another number in his address book of bodies he'd entered like houses with open doors. Which is worse? He is going to disappear into the doorway if she doesn't…

"Really…Kakashi..um…sensei. Stay and have some…" she had swallowed some of the awkwardness and was floundering in it. Kakashi raised an eyebrow, Sakura gesturing madly towards the kitchen cabinets, the slippery words evading her.

"Stay and have some…" still gesturing, going red in the face.

"Kitchen?"

"Tea, Kakashi-sensei. Tea."

"Even better."

Sakura turns so he won't see the look on her face. He unnerves her and she doesn't like it. Something is different about him. Now that she has seen that there is a person beneath the flak vest, she isn't entirely sure she likes him. May'be it would have just been better to let him leave. Tea. Tea was stupid. Tea wouldn't knead the atmosphere's tense shoulders. The tension in the air was a thick smoke, and Sakura could barely breathe. She busies herself making the stupid tea.

Sasuke is leaning against the counters staring slashing daggers at Kakashi. She wonders how it's possible that the older man does not feel those shooting bullet eyes piercing his face, blowing the fine bones apart. Instead Kakashi is looking at her. Staring straight at her. Even with her head bowed, she could feel those eyes, dark and unnerving. Sakura lifted her head and glared at him, angry although she didn't know why.

"What?" she snapped.

"May'be I…had better be going after all…"

Sakura slid a steaming cup in his direction. "Afraid you'll have to talk about last night?"

"Has anyone ever told you that your tea making skills are A+? Because your tea making skills are A+."

He wasn't even listening to her. Sakura tilted her own mug up to her face and took a long thirsty drink. Something strange was happening to her. From the moment she had opened her eyes she had felt a foreign new-ness shifting, like an alien life force in her belly. She felt as if Kakashi was still touching her, still sucking the breath from her heated body. Something moving in her gut. May'be if she drank enough scalding tea, she could drown it out.

Kakashi looked concerned, the first expression she could clearly recall seeing on his face.

"Isn't that hot?" he asks.

"No." inside of her mouth is a lit match.

She wants to turn around and see what Sasuke is doing, but she doesn't want Kakashi-sensei getting suspicious. What would he think if he knew that she was carrying around this suitcase full of scars? What if Sasuke is really there and it isn't just her tortured imagination. What if Kakashi see him, the slightest outline of sin leaning against the kitchen counter. What if their eyes meet?

Sakura takes another deep swallow of tea. Her guts are still sloshing.

"About last night, Sakura-chan…."

She struggles to swallow back her surprise, choking, manages to sputter out "Don't mention it." the tea coming back up her throat.

"No…I…the things I said…."

"You were talking out of your head. I knew that. I know that. I maybe be a little girl, but I'm not stupid. You were really drunk."

"That doesn't mean I didn't mean it."

She feels as if he just slapped her face with a hot iron. "…Well, did you?"

A tired laugh, a laugh grasping at straws that aren't there. "I don't know, that would depend on what I said."

"You don't remember?"

He shrugs.

You said I love you, she thinks. You looked me right in the eyes and said I love you. And I felt that you were talking to me, even if you weren't. You weren't…were you? Still it felt as if…

"Nothing. It was nothing Kakashi-sensei. I don't remember what you said either."

He's looking at her in an odd way. His eyes are hands peeling back her skin. Now, she knows every part of him. Every inch and river and city of his body mapped out on the thinly veined backs of her eyelids. Who is Rin? She wants to ask. Who are these people living inside of you? In your head? You become transparent when you drink. The shadows of all the prisoners you're keeping caged in your heart press their hands against your breastbone. I could see them fighting to get out.

"Can I get you any breakfast?" is what comes out of her mouth.

"I shouldn't have come here in the first place."

"No, don't go." She says too quickly, before she can dissuade it from coming out. "It's no trouble for me to whip you up something to eat." She says then quickly, to cover up the wound she's opened. She's desperate for him to stay. In her kitchen looking at her as if he can see parts of her she didn't know existed. She's desperate to have someone look at her like that. They way Sasuke never did…

She was already at the refrigerator, her hands scrabbling through the meager contents. The things she had chosen to make up her life. "Let's see I've got eggs and bacon…and cheese. I could…do an omelet?"

The silence was shifting around her.

"Kakashi?" she turned and he was gone. She hadn't even heard him shut the door. The tea cup sat still steaming on the kitchen counter, the one thing he had touched besides her. Somehow that made it more monumental. The only proof that briefly someone had been there, someone had wanted her.

Sakura swore under her breath, slamming her hands against the counter. The plaster whined in protest and cracked in half. She grabbed up the tea cup and threw it through the wall. Plaster and ceramic shrapnel, warm, brown liquid bleeding down the wallpaper. The neighbors would ask about her. Put their nosy moon faces to the hole in the wall and wonder if she needed help. Angry tears sprang to her eyes and she hated herself for crying and she hated herself for hating herself, and she didn't even know why she had wanted, needed him, so desperately, to stay.

"I'm so stupid!" she was screaming, the words dissolving into useless tears. So stupid. When would she learn? It was all her fault after all. She had been the one to take advantage of him inebriated, blinking phosphenes out of his eyes. She had been the one wanting to feel. She was stupid. So so so stupid. Why hadn't she learned?

Sasuke came up behind her. She had almost forgotten he was there. His arms around her waist strong as ropes, cold as ice, he dug his chin into her shoulder. She could breathe him in and forget. Let the past come back to her, his blue icy breath on her neck. She closed her eyes lulled by the familiar. Soon, she'd be summoned to Lady Tsunade's office, and the older woman would remark bewilderingly how the hairs on the young girl's slender neck were frozen solid.


	3. Heat

Heat

**I watched the flames slow and strange  
>Make the walls fill my eyes<br>I heard your voice through the noise  
>I was cold and it was warm inside<br>And I should have kept my head  
>I should have kept my arms inside<br>I believe it now  
>I should have kept my head<br>I should have kept my heart, my heart**

Retreat. Retreat. Retreat. Kakashi's body chants Retreat. His bones are screaming it out loud. Flames lick behind his eyes. It's as if there's a raging fire blazing in his chest and the only way to put it out is by running as fast as he can. Running until his heart can pry open those window ribs and jump out of the burning building his body had become, flinging itself into safety, badly singed, but okay.

He shoves his hands into his pockets. He doesn't look back towards Sakura's apartment complex. He won't allow himself to do it, although the recently made memories are still standing there with their arms folded, staring at him, daring him to return with their dark, pleading eyes. Kakashi swears under his breath. The bright light of day has chased his specters back into the depths of his restless mind, but he almost wants them to resurface. Obito. Rin. Where are you? Without you it's so lonely here.

This forsaken loneliness. That old familiar feeling. As if he's missing a limb. Again. It comes back to him and wraps him in its unflinching embrace again. Already he's wishing for sheets and meeting limbs again. He's lonely again. Ghosts or on his own. Which of the poisons is the sweeter? Which would kill him faster? Either way it doesn't matter. Because he won't go back. He can't go back. He can't. He can't. He can't.

A few hours before, Sakura gave him a precious gift. Her innocence. He sees that now. Sees that such things are sacrifices better suited to another altar. To a man who is incapable of breaking or falling, beaten from his throne, like a statue to a pagan god. One who doesn't drown his clingy sorrows in sake, holding them under until their kicking legs no longer buck.

Kakashi's hands are covered in blood. So much blood crusting on the heartlines on his hands. Caking underneath his nails. He touched Sakura with these bloody hands. Smeared it all over her. Even if she couldn't see it. Even if she couldn't smell it, or feel it, sticky on her fingers it is there because he has ruined her. Now, he will have to shelf her alongside the other people who have reasons to hate him. Now, he will have to avoid her.

Or may'be she will take to avoiding him. Sakura isn't stupid or blind. And naked it is obvious that his body is the burial ground for strewn corpses felled in battle. He has Obito's eye. His father's hands. Rin's heart. Kakashi is no longer himself, but a patchwork quilt of the dead. May'be as she was holding him closer and closer, Sakura smelled the decomposition on him. The rotting flesh smell you can't scrub off the wash. Perhaps he had left his dank, cemetery smell on her clean, white sheets, and she would know not to want him. How could he have been so stupid? He was dizzy with his own foolishness lank with regret. May'be she would leave him alone.

The snow. It was the snow. The people of Konoha were not used to such cold and it made them do crazy things, make brash moves, and love all the wrong people. If he had not been out gallivanting in the snow Sakura would have never stumbled upon him, never pitied him, never kissed him. It was as much his fault as it was hers. If not solely his fault alone. It was true that she had kissed him, but had she tried to pull away he wouldn't have let her. He wouldn't have wanted her to stop.

When he looked at her, in her eyes, it was clear to him that there was still beauty left in the mangled world if you were looking in the right places. There were still women who were so soft they melted beneath your fingers, like wafers under a child's tongue. As he touched her, the pink in her hair spread down into her cheeks and he had barely been able to control himself. He was alive because she was breathing and he was breathing right beside her. And all along it seemed there had been something that he missed. But he was whole only in those moments. Only as an intruder, the grabby thief forcing himself into a guarded, beautiful city, Sakura's legs like fortress walls jutting up on either side of his body.

Her urgent breathing. And Kakashi whispered "Rin". Hadn't he? Yes, he remembers, now. The word "Rin" blending into the backdrop of Sakura's constant mewing. And she hadn't pushed him away. She had loved his ghosts just as hard as she had loved him. He can still feel the imprint of her pink nails in his shoulders. She must have broke the skin.

Kakashi turns around before he can stop himself. He'll go to her. He moves his feet. He'll tell her..what? Tell her something. Ask her to forgive him. But for what? He doesn't quite know. Sakura is coming out of the complex.

His body moves on instinct, his feet jerking him clumsily backward. Kakashi flattens himself against the wall his heart pounding angry fists against his chest. Sakura doesn't notice him. She glides past him veiled in the all white snow. It makes his eyes burn. Follow her whispers the devil on his left shoulder. Follow her says the angel on his right. Her nails had torn his skin. Branding him. There must have been blood. His shoulders buzz now as she passes him like a magnet throbbing to give in to its metallic pull. He listens, holding his breath as Sakura's crunching footsteps retreat through the thick snow. Then, pulling his clothing tighter around himself Kakashi follows her.

She walks like a fly caught in a jar, trapped in her own little world. Her hands are in her pockets and her head is down and she can't be looking where she is going. Kakashi wonders what she's thinking about. Selfishly he hopes she's thinking of him. That he has become to her what she has become to him. A splinter in his brain. The harder he tries to pull it out, the deeper in it digs.

If Sakura turns around and sees him, would her eyes fill up with fear? That would make the demons real, her fear of him would justify his fear of himself. He can't bear it, and so he doesn't call out to her. Besides that, what could he offer her if she were to ask why he was behind her? He has no explanation for why he is following her, only inertia. Only that his body pushed him towards her. As soon as he saw her coming down those steps he knew he couldn't let her out of his sight. Could Sakura understand that? He is just crazy. Perhaps that is all there is. He should just go home.

None of this should have ever happened. Kakashi should have never fallen into that kiss, and now he is left with this burning feeling. This Sakura shaped hole in his side. There had to be a name for it, this striking brand of madness. Everything inside him heatedly groaning like old gears after years out of use. Kakashi doesn't do well with emotion. He really can't stomach it. He's going to be sick. If he takes one more step after her, he's going to purge his roiling guts into the snow. But the farther she walks, the more he scrambles to keep just behind her. Can't let her get away. No, don't disappear.

When Sakura goes inside the Hokage building, Kakashi hops up the side and perches on the ledge outside of the office window. He listens as Tsunade preps her an escort mission she has arranged. He cracks his knuckles anxiously. Spit her out, he wants to say to the building. Hurry up and be done with her. This crazy rushing fever has weakened his usually sharp sense of reason. He has no plan, no proposed course of action for if he's spotted hanging outside the Hokage's window. He doesn't realize this until he hears someone shout up his name from down below.

"Oi, Kakashi-sensei! What are you doing up there?"

"….Yo…Lee…I… was just… don't you find all of this snow incredibly unyouthful? Shouldn't you be baking some cookies inside where it's warm or something?"

Lee tilts his head back and laughs. His teeth are incredibly white. He's young and that makes him dumb. He doesn't know anything. He has never felt a fever like this before, Kakashi is almost certain of this. He stands up and comes down from the ledge in one agile step. Lee raises his arm and Kakashi can see the box underneath it. "Actually, I'm taking some cookie dough over to Guy –sensei!"

"You're kidding."

"No, Kakashi-sensei. I really am. In fact I was just out here looking for Sakura-chan. All of us are having a get together and…"  
>"A party and I wasn't invited?"<p>

Lee looks physically wounded by this. "I'm sorry Kakashi-sensei, I didn't think you.."

The boy's ingenuousness enrages Kakashi. He wants to physically shake him, until…no…stop. Kakashi tosses him a smile. He hopes it looks convincing. "It's alright, Lee. I'm incredibly unyouthful anyway. I'd probably spoil all the fun." He's being cruel. In the back of his mind he knows this, and hates himself for it. He can see the boy is physically flustered by his own unintentional forgetfulness. Still he continues to twist the knife in the raw wound. What is wrong with me? He questions, and still he can't stop the scowl from hardening like a callus across his face beneath the neutral mask. Lee is without a blemish and that is what bothers him most. Though he doesn't want to admit it. He wonders if the younger boy can see his selfish, source-less anger bristling beneath the Jonin vest. Filling him with a red, wiry energy that he'd later be forced to drink down. If only they could see beyond the mask, would they still think of him as their precious Kakashi-sensei?

Sakura comes jogging out of the Hokage's mansion. Bright, vivid fireworks explode in Lee's eyes.

"Sakura-chan! Looking just as beautiful as ever!"

Kakashi turns to face her. "Sakura." He says.

She doesn't look at him. "Hi, Lee." She says before moving past them both. Lee looks stunned. Kakashi falls into step behind her. "Sakura-chan, wait." She turns back questioningly. Their eyes meet, she looks away quickly. Kakashi grits his teeth.

"Yeah, Sakura-chan!" Lee calls, jogging forward. "Wait! I wanted to-."

"Lee, Sakura and I are talking." Kakashi says, spinning around on him. Suddenly they have all stopped talking. Suddenly, they are all looking at him. Sakura's stare blisters him. Lee's energy falters. First confusion, then something duller. A mad dance of waltzing, tangled emotion high steps across his cheeks.

"But…but I thought…."

Kakashi puts his hand tightly around Sakura's wrist. Feels her muscles tense as her hand calcifies into a fist, but she doesn't pull away. Something in Lee deflates. Suddenly, he is smaller. Older. He opens his slack mouth like a gasping fix, his tongue searching the wet empty cavern for words to sputter up. Kakashi doesn't give him the chance to find any. He turns and walks away, leading Sakura by the wrist. Her fist continues to stare up at him. Sakura won't look at him, instead she glares straight ahead, her jaw clenched tighter than a steel trap sealed by her fury.

Kakashi looks over his shoulder. Lee is standing in the snow watching them. He blinks slowly and quite mournfully, wearing the expression of someone who has just been shot in the chest with an arrow. Sakura isn't look at him.

"You're mad at me." Says Kakashi.

"Mad? That's ridiculous! Why would I be mad?" Sakura spits at him, and he realizes she had been waiting all along to speak, perhaps waiting until Lee was significantly out of earshot. "Why did you that?

"Lee is a loveable boy, Sakura-chan. But is he really your type? I mean…look at those eyebrows, he probably spends more time in the mirror than you do."

"Kakashi, I'm not joking with you!" Her eyes are sharp and acidic, are peeling the flesh from his face. For a minute he thinks she's going to hit him. She looks down at their conjoined body parts his hand clasping her wrist and yanks her arm away.

"What are you doing?"

"I don't know." He says weakly. And it's truth. He doesn't know what he's doing anymore. His head is spinning. Everything is starting to bleed together. Her eyes bleed down her face, her mouth washes down her chin. His vision shimmers brighter, whiter than the surrounding snow.

"I just…I messed things up with us."

Sakura looks away. "What us, Kakashi-sensei? There is no us." She smiles sadly at him. It is a smile that reeks of pity. Poor Kakashi-sensei. Deluded and emotional.

"So, last night really meant absolutely nothing to you, then?" he snaps.

"A drunken kiss that escalated into something more. We've discussed this…"

"Honesty, Sakura-chan. Be honest with me."

She doesn't say anything, then. A rip is torn in the atmosphere between them, the bloody silence hangs, festering. This frostbitten world is the same one he has always been living in and yet nothing looks the same to Kakashi anymore. It is as if this fever inside him has melted the ice coating his eyes to slush and now he can see all things clearly. Looking at Sakura now, he realizes he has never really known her at all. She is so thin, so much prettier than he remembers. He looks down at her mouth willing her to speak, as if coaxing words from her mouth could be that easy.

"I know you followed me here, Kakashi-sensei." She says at last. "I would appreciate it if you didn't do that anymore. This is getting creepy. Just leave me alone." She doesn't look at him when he turns to go and Kakashi doesn't try to stop her.

He watches her until she disappears into the snow, then he goes home to the echoing walls. He honors her wishes and doesn't try to see her. He avoids her in the streets, ducking into the alleys when he sees her coming closer. He banishes her from his thoughts, he doesn't dream about her. On the day she leaves the village he watches from the window her tiny frame retreating through the village gates, but it stirs nothing inside him. She has become just another retreating figure. Yet when a month has passed and there is no word from Sakura, and the snow has not let up, and the hole she loved into his body starts up the slightest ache, it is Kakashi who goes to Tsunade and alerts her that something must be terribly, terribly wrong.


End file.
